1Malaysia Development Bhd. Nears a Sorry End

The Malaysian
government, according to a source in Kuala Lumpur, has begun to
officially dismantle 1Malaysia Development Bhd., the Ministry of
Finance-backed development fund that was brought into being by Prime
Minister Najib Razak in 2008 and which has morphed into what arguably is
the biggest scandal in Malaysian history although it hasn’t dented
Najib’s hold on power.

The implications for investors are
unclear. What assets are not sold off are expected to be moved into the
Ministry of Finance, with the board of advisers – headed by Najib – and
the board of directors being dissolved. A well-connected businessman
told Asia Sentinel last week that the government – and thus the
taxpayers – will probably end up having to eat the losses.

However, the eight-year history of the
fund is an astonishing tale of greed and chicanery, with billions of
dollars apparently having been stolen or otherwise unaccounted for,
diverted into accounts in the Cayman and British Virgin Islands.
Investigators believe that as much as US$1 billion was routed into
Najib’s own accounts in March of 2013 before being diverted out again in
October of that year, to disappear into cyberspace.

The scandal has played a major part in
fomenting distrust in the United Malays National Organization, the
leading party in the national ruling coalition, with Najib firing his
own party vice president and deputy prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, as
well as Attorney General Abdul Ghani Patail, in an effort to contain
the scandal. Other government officials have been sidelined or
neutralized.

It has driven former Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad to seek a deal with opposition figures including Lim
Kit Siang, the head of the Democratic Action Party, whom he jailed in
1986, and others, in the vain attempt to bring down Najib. So far,
propped up as head of UMNO and thus as Prime Minister by the votes of
196 district chiefs who are said to have been bought off with
rent-seeking jobs and contracts as well as outright bribes, Najib has
remained invulnerable, also by threatening opponents with jail, closing
influential newspapers temporarily and shortstopping a reported
investigation by the Malaysian Anti-Crime Commission that was on the
edge of recommending his indictment. A similar request from Bank Negara,
the central bank, for an investigation into the movement of funds was
simply ignored.

The scandal has also ensnared Goldman
Sachs’ former Southeast Asia head, Tim Leissner, who engineered a huge
US$3 billion sale of 1MDB bonds that earned Goldman an estimated US$500
million. Leissner left the firm and moved to Los Angeles, where he has
reportedly been meeting with FBI officials.

The fund is believed to be RM42
billion (US$11.6 million) in debt against an unknown amount of assets,
and with the government in a protracted squabble with an Abu Dhabi
entity, the International Petroleum Investment Corp. (IPIC) over as much
as US$3.5 billion of funds that 1MDB officials thought they were
transferring to an IPIC subsidiary, Aabar Investments PJS.

The money instead went into a
BVI-registered company called Aabar BVI and has since disappeared. IPIC
officials refused to make a payment of US$50 million to bondholders when
it discovered that the money had been diverted, stirring fears of a
cross-default that could imperil the country’s financial system.

Rafizi Ramli, the secretary general of
the opposition Parti Keadilan Rakyat, in March reportedly displayed
figures indicating that transfers from Tabung Haji, the fund that
invests savings for Muslims to make the Haj to Mecca, were depleted to
the point that the fund was endangered. Rafizi was charged with sedition
and briefly jailed. Several other opposition figures including Tony
Pua, spokesman for the DAP, have been threatened with sedition charges
for questioning the 1MDB operations.

Officials of 1MDB and others
associated with the sovereign investment company, with interests in
power and property, are being pursued by investigators in five
countries, most prominently the United States, whose US Attorney for the
Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, has sent FBI investigators
to Malaysia to seek clues to allegations of money laundering on the
part of the Najib family for the purchase of expensive real estate in
New York and California and for the funding of the blockbuster movie
Wolf of Wall Street.

Other law enforcement agencies include
the Attorney General of Switzerland, which has accused unnamed
individuals of laundering as much as US$4 billion from 1MDB through
Swiss bank outlets in Singapore. Singapore is said to have frozen the
bank accounts of several individuals as well. Most recently, officials
in Luxembourg opened an investigation into 1MDB’s affairs.

The fund got its start in 2008 when
Jho Taek Low, then a 27-year-old Penang-born financier and friend of the
Najib family, persuaded Najib to take over a budding investment fund
that he had proposed to the Sultan of Terengganu, who backed away from
it. The fund embarked on a torrid acquisition process, buying vastly
overpriced independent power producers from companies and individuals
closely connected with the UMNO ruling clique including the Genting
gaming and plantation conglomerate and Ananda Khrishnan, one of the
country’s richest men. With 1MDB facing huge debts from the purchases,
the government pushed through no-bid contracts to hand 1MDB’s power
units lucrative deals at the expense of competitive bidding.

It was given the gift of the obsolete
Sungei Besi air force base, close to downtown Kuala Lumpur, which it
sought to turn into a high-priced financial center called the Tun Razak
Exchange, named for Najib’s father.

But hundreds of millions of dollars
allegedly were diverted into Jho Low’s personal accounts. As Asia
Sentinel reported in 2014, Jho Low – a private individual – attempted to
use 1MDB guarantees in a vain attempt to buy three of London’s finest
hotels, the Connaught, the Berkeley and Claridge’s. He acquired a
300-foot yacht and a flock of enormously expensive paintings that he has
since begun to sell off.

Reuters reported in April that RM18
billion of 1MDB’s debt linked to its power assets would go under Edra
Energy, which is due to be sold off in nine months’ time. It is also
expected to sell off two high-profile property projects, the Tun Razak
Exchange and Bandar Malaysia, after splitting them into separate
entities. Critics have charged that the land under the stalled projects
has repeatedly been revalued upward to unrealistic levels in an attempt
to cover the indebtedness. Once the assets are sold off, 1MDB is
expected to be dissolved completely.